Richard P. Howe, Jr. Protecting the Capitol: 1861 & 2021

Protecting the Capitol: 1861 & 2021

richard p. howe, jr.

On April 19, 1861, about 200 soldiers from Lowell were attacked in Baltimore while en route to Washington, D.C., to protect the U.S. government from those who sought to overthrow it. The Lowell men were part of the Sixth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment that had rapidly mobilized and moved out in response to President Abraham Lincoln’s desperate call for militia troops—the National Guard of the 19th century—to hurry to Washington to help safeguard the government. The members of the mob in Baltimore that attacked the troops were sympathetic to those in the South who had revolted against the established government and sought to prevent the northern troops from getting to Washington to assist in its defense.

As a contingent of the soldiers marched down Baltimore’s Pratt Street in transit from the city’s northern train station to its southern one, the mob assaulted the troops with sticks, stones, bricks, and then guns, killing four of the soldiers and injuring several dozen more. The soldiers fired back at their attackers, killing twelve of them.

The events in Baltimore on that April 19 are memorialized in paintings, woodcuts, etchings and drawings but there are no photographs. Had there been, they would have looked much like the scenes we witnessed on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, when a violent mob attacked, overwhelmed, and injured members of the Capitol police force in an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States.

The similarities between the two deadly events are many: in both cases, a riotous mob sought to reverse the outcome of an election. In both cases, racism was the foundation of the grievances of the mob. In both cases, some government officials and some members of the police and military provided support and encouragement to the mob. In both cases, the mob was incited by demagogues who sought the overthrow of the duly elected government. And when the surviving members of the Sixth Mass finally made it to Washington, D.C., they were quartered in the U.S. Capitol, just as thousands of National Guard troops are today.

There were differences: The mob of 1861 was clad in wool and cotton while the mob of 2021 wore kevlar and ripstop nylon. The mob of 1861 lacked the audacity to directly attack the U.S. Capitol (although they had the capability to attack and seize it) while the mob of 2021 violently assaulted the seat of our democracy and our representatives within it.

But the biggest difference was that in 1861, the president of the United States stood firmly against the mob, called them out for their traitorous behavior, and mobilized the nation to put down the insurrection even though that effort took four years and cost

725,000 lives. In 1861, Abraham Lincoln persevered and succeeded in defeating the mob, safeguarding the country, and reinventing it by forcing the abolition of slavery.

In 2021, the president of the United States helped organize, incite, lead and assist the mob. The election of 2021 was not stolen. There was no widespread voter fraud that changed the result. More than 60 court cases were brought to challenge the results and all were dismissed because there was no evidence. Yet the president of 2021 persisted with this Big Lie, repeating it over and over again until many came to believe it. “Everyone is saying it so it must be true” is the objective of the Big Lie. Next, he invited his supporters to come to Washington on January 6, saying, “It will be wild.” Then on January 6, he gave a speech to those supporters that was riddled with violent imagery and calls to fight harder and to show strength. Even before the president finished speaking, the mob commenced its short march to the Capitol and immediately assaulted the police guarding the building and forced their way inside.

American law has a concept called “proximate cause” which means that an action is considered a cause of harm if it was reasonably foreseeable that harm would result from the action. A legal textbook could use the preceding paragraph as a classic example of this concept: the president and his actions were the proximate cause of the attack on the Capitol.

Even more insidious yet rarely acknowledged was the president’s role in suppressing the government’s response to the attack on the Capitol. Besides the Capitol Police and the D.C. Metro Police, every agency of the government that could lend support beforehand and reinforcements during the attack were under the command of the president as commander in chief. How many agency leaders, intimidated by the president, undercut the estimate of the threat and the preparations for it? Hardening the defenses of the Capitol in the face of a rally of the president’s supporters, led by the president himself would have been “bad optics” and would have incurred his ire. These government officials were more afraid of him than they were of the mob that sought the violent overthrow of the government. Once the attack began, the same agency leaders were slow to respond, again because they were intimidated by this president. If this seems far-fetched, ask yourself, who stood to gain the most by disrupting the counting of the electoral college votes if not the man in power who was destined to lose power as a result of that vote?

A final difference between 1861 and 2021: Back then, the conflict resulted in a deadly conventional war between the United States and the five million (non-enslaved) residents that revolted against it. That same kind of war will not occur now but that is because the conflict in 2021 will more closely resemble an insurgency with a violent and deadly minority using terrorism to try to seize control of the government from the majority.

It’s getting crazier and there is no end in sight.